Large concrete barriers will likely go up by the end of the year to block cars, buses and vans from parking at Laniakea Beach, transportation officials announced at a meeting this week to address the traffic problems there.
The state Department of Transportation considers those 20-foot-long barriers the best possible fix for the growing safety hazards and congestion at Laniakea, where some 600,000 tourists and local residents venture each year to encounter Hawaiian sea turtles in their natural environment.
DOT consultants touted the plan at a meeting Wednesday of the Laniakea Task Force — a group formed in 2011 to study possible solutions.
However, most of the 100 or so North Shore residents who attended did not support the barrier solution, and only seven of the 19 task force members voted for the barrier plan, according to several who were there.
Nonetheless, DOT officials say the plan to place the barriers across a 1,000-foot beachfront stretch just mauka of Kamehameha Highway is nearly a done deal, pending review of community comments at the meeting.
"The task force was absolutely ignored of its opinion," said Gil Riviere, a former state representative and former task force member. Riviere said he sat in on the task force Wednesday for one of its members, Kawika Au, who could not attend.
The seven members who voted in favor of the barriers supported the idea only as a one-year trial project, Riviere added.
Many on the North Shore say that blocking all cars from accessing Laniakea goes too far. While the situation there has grown chaotic in recent years, Laniakea is the first true stretch of beach accessible to the public east of Haleiwa, they say.
Local residents further say the state, which owns the highway, should be capable of working with the city, which owns the land just mauka of the road, to craft a better solution that manages traffic and pedestrian flows. But the two entities have been unable to agree on a fix over liability issues.
On Thursday DOT Highways Administrator Alvin Takeshita said that building a parking lot would be costlier and more complicated than many of those residents realize. Such a parking lot project would fall outside the state agency’s role, which handles roads, congestion relief and "transportation purposes," he said.
Building a parking lot would be a multimillion-dollar "hard-core" project requiring numerous local and federal permits, and the state would have trouble securing matching federal highway dollars because there’s no category that would fit for a parking lot, Takeshita added.
A study that Hawaii tourism officials gave to the DOT counted 2,500 visitors and 156 buses and vans visiting Laniakea in one day, Takeshita said.
"There must be a safer place to redirect visitors to see our turtles," he said. "This is the quickest reaction that we can have."
If the barrier plan doesn’t work, "I’m going to be the first to pull it," Takeshita said.
